Alaric the Goth
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A century later, in the 370s—somewhere a stone’s throw from that river—a Gothic mother would be cradling her newborn son in a quaint seaside corner of the land called Pine Tree Island, situated off the Black Sea coast. The family named the boy Alaric.
Alaric and other Goths who grew up living on the Roman frontier learned to develop an identity for themselves rooted outside of Rome, yet within its shadow. This delicate balancing act shaped Alaric’s upbringing, even leading him, as a young man, to cross the river border. Roman sophisticates would always call his birthplace a “backwater,” but if there’s one thing we can state confidently about Alaric’s childhood, it’s that Pine Tree Island was no sleepy boondocks, regardless of what the Romans wished to believe.
The Romans never enjoyed living on this frontier. The first people to go to the northeast, in the early first century A.D., had hated it. The dreariness of everyday life, absent the luxurious baths and elevated dinner conversations he was accustomed to, made Ovid feel “metamorphosed.” Or so he wrote in a letter back to Rome from his exile in northern Thrace, along the eastern Danube on the Black Sea. A prolific poet, Ovid knew that nothing was better for the writing process than peace and quiet. But he struggled to write in this “barbarian land, the most remote in the vast world.”
Ovid penned a collection of poetic “lamentations,” the Tristia, while living in exile, and in it he was unrelenting in his contempt for the people and the unfamiliar environment. “Privacy and ease” were in short supply. “The pine planks resound from the battering, the ropes from the shrieking wind, and the very keel” of more than one Black Sea freight ship “groans,” he wrote. Every day brought a different “state of mourning.” The Tristia is full of wallowing self-pity, interrupted only by a prayer to Dionysus, the god of alcohol.
What bothered Romans like Ovid the most was not the fact of being marginalized, at the border of their empire. The problems arose from the people one encountered: ethnic Sarmatians, Getae, Dacians, and Thracians, along with their different languages, their indigenous dress, and the unfathomable way their cultures seemed to fetishize violence. Ovid himself never singled out one group as more frightful than the others. With a little poetic license, he and other Roman observers simply lumped these natives together in a picture that must have sounded dreadful to Romans back home.
Locals strode through villages with knives “fastened to their sides,” and rarely did you pass someone on horseback who wasn’t carrying a bow, a quiver, and “darts yellow with viper’s gall.” Even their “twang,” as Ovid called it, made him wince. “If I look upon the men, they are scarce men worthy of the name,” he said. “They have more of cruel savagery than wolves.”
Tall tales and blunt judgments were not the only part of the Roman argot. Ovid may have been disgruntled at being sent to the frontier, banished there under mysterious circumstances involving a female member of Emperor Augustus’s family. But other Romans went willingly, or at least accepted the peril and kept an open mind about the adventure. Many were soldiers, men whose families and descendants would become a common sight along the river in Alaric’s day.
Romans who lived on the Danube had always noticed that the situation at the frontier could be tense, as Ovid himself remarked: “Peace there is at times, confidence in peace never.” Less than a century after Ovid, Rome led its war machine to the river in a series of merciless military campaigns that would become known as the Dacian Wars. They devastated the region. Untold numbers of Dacians who lived in the area’s mountains, marshes, and grasslands were captured, the people enslaved and displaced.
Carved scenes on Emperor Trajan’s war memorial in Rome, a hundred-foot-tall marble column at the height of a small Roman hill, illustrated the ingenuities and the pieties of the Roman military, as well as the brutal realities of that war, for the people of the homefront. On it the Roman army chops down the local willows and uses the timber to construct a bridge to cross the Danube. Emperor Trajan solemnly presides at a pagan religious gathering, and Roman soldiers engage in a hunt for the native Dacian chief, Decebalus, who evades capture by taking his own life. In all, the nearly eighty sculpted panels celebrated the story of the Roman Empire’s first expansion to the northeast. The result of Trajan’s conquest was a new Roman province, called Dacia, named after the people whose lands the Romans had just stolen. Its geographical center was the Transylvanian mountains.
Romans enthusiastically decorated their tombs with scenes showing the brutality of war, including images of defeated foreigners like this husband and wife, who lament their sudden captivity.
When the Roman soldiers who had fought in the Dacian Wars retired, many of them did so in that rugged area, and their presence gradually fulfilled Ovid’s hope that a “confidence in peace” might one day take root. As it did, the cities beyond the Danube River grew. Soon civilian settlers from Italy and elsewhere through the empire were arriving, many hoping to extract gold from the Transylvanian mountains, where mines had been operating unofficially since the Stone Age and had come under Roman control during the invasions of the second century.
For the next two hundred years, thrill seekers rushed to Rome’s newest territories. They brought with them expectations for a different future, including hope for a better quality of life or at least one similar to what they had known in the Mediterranean. Over time, with the arrival of Roman customs—like new technology, an established industry of borrowing and lending, and the use of bronze and silver coins for everyday transactions, pressed with the official mint marks of the Roman Empire—they changed the look and feel of old Dacia. Many settlers and locals became wealthy.
A sense of the prosperity of the times is best revealed through archaeological evidence. Starting near the end of the eighteenth century, in 1786, workers in the city of Roşia Montană, Romania—near the ancient Roman metropolis of Alburnus Maior—unearthed twenty-five ancient wax tablets in an abandoned Transylvanian mine. All of them were about the size of a paperback book. They were what later writers termed triptychs, hinged planks of wood with wax panels on the inside, which the Romans designed to guarantee the security of contracts.
These wooden artifacts worked according to an early iteration of two-factor authentication. Interested parties drew up the terms of their contract and wrote them on two of the panels’ faces. Each party signed the document, and then the two tablets were folded together and covered with a third. Holes were bored through all three pieces and a string threaded through them, tying them shut. Once the Roman contract was sealed, a second, identical version of the legal agreement was written on the cover, preventing either party from falsifying the original, locked inside. The process was designed to stop financial fraud.
This technology became such an effective way of preventing forgeries that in the first century the Roman emperor Nero signed a law mandating the use of it for all business transactions in the city of Rome. By the second century, locals were employing it in distant Dacia.
The Dacian contracts bring us face-to-face with everyday life in the Roman territories throughout the empire. Notwithstanding the Roman concern for law and order, it was a society of brazen behavior and calculated risk. And as the Roman gold miners moved in and soldiers of the empire retired on land given to them as a pension by the state, the worst practices of ancient Rome came with them. Men, women, even children were bought and sold as slaves. One contract, among many like it, recorded such slave sales:
Maximus son of Bato bought and acquired, for the price of 205 denarii, a girl, a foundling, who goes by the name Passia (or whatever other name she goes by) through a sale with Dasius son of Verzo, a Pirustian from Kavieretium. She is around six years old. It is agreed the girl is in good health, free of crime or injury to another person, and is not known to be a runaway.
Since there was always the chance that a slave’s former owner might try to reclaim his lost “property,” contracts like this were the legal way for traders in Roman territory to indemnify themselves. The partie
s would agree that the buyer would be owed a full refund, plus fees, if ever forced to forfeit his “purchase.” Many of the contracts invoked Fides, the Roman goddess of “reliability,” to ensure that each signatory understood that the other was acting in good faith. Many Dacian boys and girls had their childhoods ripped away in this “lawful” system of human trafficking.
The Dacian conquests established a long history of slave trading on the river, a despicable practice that knew no ethnic distinction. Two hundred years after the little girl Passia was sold to a trader—after the Dacians mysteriously vanished and the Goths settled this same territory—many Gothic people would be forced into slavery, too. “There was hardly a region [of the empire] that lacked Gothic slaves,” one Roman writer boasted in Alaric’s day. Gothic labor, like Dacian slave labor before it, was considered cheap because of the overwhelming “supply.” There were slaves to be found everywhere at the border, one Roman senator explained to his brother. At the river, “the price [for slaves] is right.” Galatian hunters had the worst reputation and were known to snatch up any Goth “for sale in all parts, without distinction of status.” As a result, Gothic children spent their youth grinding millstones like pack animals, sweeping farmhouses, or plowing fields. Every Roman home in Alaric’s day was said to have at least a Gothic slave or two.
The first-generation settlers of the Danube frontier were callous, ruthless, and greedy. They were also enterprising: they purchased homes, signed leases on workshops, and made business partnerships. They had stomachs to feed and their own dreams to fulfill. Not all were as finely educated as Ovid. If we can make a safe deduction from the Latin tombstones and contracts they left behind, their spelling was frequently poor—a provincial uxcor, “my wive,” for a dear uxor, “wife.” Frontiersmen died and left their widows to wonder what would happen to them. Parents lived long lives: sixty years in one mother’s case, seventy years for her husband. Their children, who never had known a life in another province, mourned them, honored them, and stayed.
As the hum of these colonial outposts enticed more visitors, it was increasingly hard to tell, throughout the second century, who was a Roman citizen and who was not, based on dress, language, or appearance alone. A rising tide of opportunity, which lifted both the Roman colonists and the indigenous people, was coming to three continents. As Rome established its provinces around the Mediterranean Sea, Roman culture came with it. Roman gods, writing, law, business, fashion, styles of art and architecture, tastes in wine, even kitchenware spread. The seeds of being Roman, Romanitas, took root in many of these local environments, cropping up in places as varied as the desert oases of modern Jordan and the damp fortified camps of modern Britain.
By the early third century, the Mediterranean world, not just Dacia, had blossomed into a multicultural, multiracial, multiethnic society. And the idea that every free person living in Roman territory might be or become a Roman citizen no longer seemed an impossible dream. In the year 212, in fact, a rebel, renegade emperor finally made it a reality.
Emperor Caracalla, like all political anomalies, confounded his Roman constituents. Whereas the Romans of his day expected competency, honesty, and stability from their leaders, he became best known for murdering his brother, shunning most state protocols, and refusing to outgrow his childish preference for a hooded cloak, the caracallis, which became the source of his nickname. His family hailed from the coast of North Africa. His father, also an emperor, had been a well-regarded administrator and talented general.
Many Romans were critical of Caracalla’s judgment largely because he lacked his father’s studied statesmanship. But the Antonine Declaration, which he published in 212 under his given Latin name, Antoninus, changed ancient Mediterranean life irrevocably. Every free-born resident of a Roman province was immediately given citizenship. At Caracalla’s prompting, tens of millions of people across three continents began to pledge allegiance to that powerful ideal—being a Roman—which no one had yet defined. Some saw the emperor’s move toward radical political equality as financially driven, an attempt to fill Rome’s coffers with a new revenue stream, since citizens paid an inheritance tax but provincials did not. These cynical voices may have been correct, but the effect of the new law was undeniable. What it meant to be a Roman had changed. Anyone could be a Roman in Caracalla’s new world.
By coincidence, a gruff young Gothic farmer’s son named Maximinus, born and raised in the mountains of Thrace, due south of Alaric’s later home, would stand among the first to benefit.
Caracalla’s legal innovation revolutionized Roman society. For centuries, during the most economically robust and most stable years of its thousand-year existence, many people living inside the borders of the Roman Empire had been forced to earn their citizenship. Residents of earlier periods of Roman history did not uniformly hold the same legal status. In the time of the Roman Republic, before the rise of men like Julius Caesar, citizenship had originally been limited to free men and women who dwelled in the capital city. To vote meant physically being present in Rome, and to be a citizen, a highly prized legal status, meant living within the city walls. If they did, Roman citizens could be assured that, when they lent money, made wills, or sold real estate or human beings, their transactions—and any grievances caused by them—could be adjudicated in a Roman court.
As Rome expanded, however, and colonized the Italian peninsula, residents of small Italian towns demanded the same rights but without having to change residences and move to Rome. In the first century B.C., the Senate granted those rights, an occasion that marked the first expansion of citizenship in Rome’s history. Eventually, as Roman settlements overran Italy’s borders and spread throughout the Mediterranean, the process of extending these legal privileges, called “Italian rights,” repeated itself, albeit at a slower pace and on a smaller scale. Only select individuals or, in some cases, entire cities were awarded Roman citizenship.
The application for Roman citizenship varied, depending on one’s trade or area of residency. For example, after twenty-five years of service in the military, a veteran earned it automatically, and the citizenship status passed to his family and descendants in perpetuity. One’s residence could also play a determining factor, as settlers in the larger metropolises of the frontier could, and frequently did, petition the emperors for “Italian rights,” since they had taken up a life of hardship away from the Mediterranean. It was the emperor’s prerogative to award it to them, and many rulers did so gladly, a thank-you to these first-generation entrepreneurs and self-made diplomats. Even before Caracalla announced his sweeping new law, settlers in the five largest towns of Dacia and their families had already been given the same legal rights as if they lived in Italy.
Citizenship ignited new hopes and dreams and turned many peripheral cities, thousands of miles from Rome, into beacons of opportunity for people on the frontier. As Roman towns boomed and main streets filled with ambitious tradesmen, vendors, and government workers, a nearby farmer might be tempted to leave behind the drudgery of his fields or the chores of animal wrangling. It was not unheard of for local residents to trade their farmsteads for an urban way of life and a modest city apartment, perhaps expecting to benefit from the next announcement of “Italian rights.” Foreign-born soldiers, after their deployments, retired on land on the fringes of the empire, too. New experiments in Romanitas emerged from these intermingled communities. “Recently, we have been settled by veteran soldiers and become a most glorious colony,” one Roman lawyer boasted. The sight of yet more new faces arriving in his quiet hamlet in the province of Numidia, already inhabited by members of a local ethnic group known as the Gaetulians, made him proud.
This bronze document belonged to a foreign soldier named Reburrus who served with Emperor Trajan’s cavalry during the Dacian Wars; Reburrus later retired to Britain, where the object was found. The Latin text explains that Reburrus’s unit was granted “citizenship for themselves, for their children and all their descendants.”
Max’s parents had cultivated a respect for Rome from the moment of his birth. Although they hailed from different ethnic backgrounds, they had given their son a recognizably Latin name. His father, Micca, was a Goth, his mother an Alan, one of the many native people who lived in the region of the Danube. Both of them may have harbored the common parental hope that their boy, with his stalwart Roman-sounding name, would nudge his way into opportunities they’d never had. Countless foreigners around the empire had done the same.